Equalizers and adaptive equalizers are often used to compensate for interference or distortions that occur in a signal during transmission over a communication channel including anomalies in the signal that are generated at the transmitter or receiver and over the transmission medium. One common type of interference is generally referred to as InterSymbol Interference (ISI), which denotes the impact on a given symbol that may result from neighboring symbols, normally previously transmitted symbols. ISI may result from various factors, including intentional causes, e.g., transmitter filters used for spectral efficiency or receive filters used for adjacent channel interference reduction, or undesirable and largely uncontrollable causes, e.g., multi-path fading in the channel or transmitter & receiver imperfections.
Multi-path fading distorts a transmitted symbol in both shape as well as symbol duration or length (commonly referred to as dispersion). Communication channels may exist in differing fading environments with the resultant distortion varying significantly. One example of a present communications system that is widely used for various cellular phone communications systems is commonly referred to as EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution, where GSM is an acronym for the Global System for Mobile Communications). In EDGE signal transmissions a transmitted symbol pulse lasts for 4 symbol periods. It has been observed that communication over a Hill Terrain (HT) channel or a Rural Area (RA) channel can expand or lengthen the received symbol pulse by 5.4 symbol periods. Additionally, movement between the transmitter and receiver (typically due to a mobile station (MS) traveling relative to base station (BS)) will result in changes in the received symbol pulse over time, with the rate of change being a function of the rate of movement (speed of travel).
Many communication systems, such as an EDGE system utilize a training sequence that is transmitted as part of a burst (collection of a multiplicity of symbols) and in EDGE is located in the middle of the burst. The training sequence allows the receiver at the mobile or base station to estimate the characteristics of the channel (channel estimation). Given the channel estimation various forms of Equalizers have been used or proposed which reduce the ISI. Unfortunately such Equalizers tend to consume large amounts of processing resources, e.g. processor cycles, memory space, etc., and often have performance limitations when dealing with different combinations of channel complexity (amount of or rates of fading) and signal levels.